Started playing this game last night. Once you get the hang of how the board works, it's addicting.

2048, the creation of a 19-year-old Italian programmer named Gabriele Cirulli, showed up free and fully open-sourced on Github earlier this month. The game is Web-based, although a mobile site is also available, and plenty of unofficial ports for Android and other platforms have begun to pop up.

2048 could be loosely described as similar to Threes, or like Candy Crush for math geeks, and while it's tough to understand what's happening at first glance, it only takes a minute to pick up the game and then you're off on the road to procrastination-enabling addiction.

Cirulli debuted the game on March 9. Three days later he tweeted that thousands of people were playing the game at one moment:

@gabrielecirulli wrote:28000 people playing #2048game right now. The amount of man-hours spent playing this game will never be returned to humanity.